To hear it from some news reports, the Second American Civil War may begin this Monday, in Richmond, Virginia. The state legislature, which Democrats took control of last fall for the first time in decades, has been considering a slate of fairly standard gun-control reforms—background checks, ammunition limits, an assault weapons ban. Over the last few months growing numbers of irate and highly weaponized Virginians (nearly all of them, unsurprisingly, white) have been showing up at local government meetings making intemperate remarks and outlandish demands. Now some of the pro-gun groups—to the right even of the National Rifle Organization—have organized a show of force at Virginia’s annual “lobby day” in Richmond, a clear attempt to intimidate the legislature into submission.
There have been some interesting and disturbing developments over the last few days, and the weekend is likely to bring more. First, Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency in the capital and banned the possession of any weapons (including guns) in or around the legislative building. (A judge upheld Northam’s order.) Second, the FBI arrested three white-supremacists who were actively planning violence in Richmond.
The Richmond rally is unlikely to actually lead to a second civil war. I doubt the federal government (and the US military) will have to choose sides. What’s noteworthy, however, is the introduction of “second civil war” talk into what really ought to be an unexceptional (if heated) debate over public policy. Why does this idea keep popping up? Why does it seem like a serious explosion of political violence—a coming-to-a-head of all our national conflicts and contradictions—is something we both fear and, weirdly, subconsciously, desire? Why are we so taken in by this rhetoric?
I suspect it’s because we have never really wrestled the (first) Civil War into a comfortable, unthreatening place in our national narrative. It is essentially therefore a place-holder, a euphemism, for the dark nether-regions of our collective political life which we are both intrigued by and frightened to explore. At a moment when nerves are shot, as tensions keep escalating, it’s natural to want something to break, to seek a release, so we can let our emotions out and move on. But a civil war, needless to say, would be horrible, and we should do everything we can to avoid it.
All of this—Virginia, guns, civil war—has been brewing for a long time. On a trip my wife and I took to the Smoky Mountains seven or eight years ago, we stayed at a motel in the far southeastern corner of Virginia where the rooms are decommissioned train cabooses. We had a nice long chat with the owner, who, on hearing we were from New York, firmly but good-naturedly informed us that if Mike Bloomberg, then mayor of New York City, intended to come down to Virginia and take away his guns, he, the caboose-motel proprietor, would be ready.
I have to assume he is now one of those showing up to these meetings. As the Guardian reported in its thorough report on this brewing revolt, Bloomberg’s gun-control group Everytown poured millions into last year’s Virginia state elections, and helped flip the statehouse blue. Last month the NRA produced an ad blaming the new Virginia gun-control proposals on Bloomberg. At the flip of a switch, that kind of rhetoric could go somewhere very dark indeed.
The gun-toting activists flooding local government meetings have been demanding that towns and counties effectively nullify the new state laws. This, you’ll note, is the same “sanctuary” language used by blue states and cities in refusing to cooperate with the enforcement of federal law. At least 125 municipalities have already passed such resolutions, though experts note that they do not have any legal force. Still, several law-enforcement officials have said they will not enforce state-level gun regulations with which they disagree. One sheriff even offered to swear in hundreds of county residents as deputies so they could keep their guns. Other legislators passed a resolution asserting their right to form citizens into a militia to protect their rights.
Should legal methods prove insufficient, one speaker told a protest rally of some 800 people, “I really do think we may be on the brink of another war.”
Scouting for a belated sequel to Charlottesville, right-wing militias and white-supermacist groups are taking advantage of the movement to try to create the kind of social breakdown that would allow them to either destroy the federal government or establish whites-only enclaves within the territory of the United States. The obvious and self-conscious echo here is of The Turner Diaries, the 1978 novel by Nazi leader William Pierce which imagined an attempt by the federal government to confiscate guns triggering a racially-inflected civil war in which a neo-Nazi organization called the Order murders blacks and Jews, seizes nuclear weapons, and starts a global race war for white supremacy. The book inspired Timothy McVeigh and countless other violent white-supremacists in the decades since. The racist gun nuts flocking to Richmond on Monday believe their moment has finally arrived to turn it into reality. (NPR did an interesting segment on The Turner Diaries last spring.)
So, could this lead to the outbreak of a second civil war—or, as some internet-obsessed right-wingers have taken to calling it, “the boogaloo”? (The term is derived from some inane ‘80s-film meme).
If there is to be a second civil war, Monday’s Richmond rally will likely not be it. More probably it is a sort of test-run, a “stress test” for our fracturing political culture. Episodes like this—usually based on some kind of media-primed pseudo-event rather than real-world necessity (like, say, resupplying Fort Sumter)—normalize the possibility that our intense political disagreements might tip over into something worse. If it sometimes seems like the threat of force is simply a bluff to convince the other side to back down, that shouldn’t be comforting. After Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election, many Southerners otherwise reluctant to leave the Union only did so because they didn’t want to be ridiculed for having made empty threats to secede. Their honor, as much as their interests, were at stake.
It’s unnervingly easy to imagine a version of this showdown playing out not in Richmond but in Washington itself, a year from now, after a Democratic president and Congress push through new gun-control regulations. These are the kinds of showdowns that American history suggests can get very ugly, very fast.
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